The photo section on my blog, the main page of which I have now named COLLECTION, initially only served as an overview of the available or already used hero images for the various pages of the blog, such as posts and others. In the meantime, detailed pages for the individual photos and a world map have been added, in order to follow the IndieWeb idea that I want to publish my photos on my own site with all the information first and then syndicate them on other platforms.

At some point I implemented three different view modes for the photos, more out of a desire to play around than out of necessity: Grid, List and lastly Masonry. Depending on the device class, one mode or the other has its advantages in terms of overview.

What was still missing, however, was the option to filter and/or sort the amount of photos according to their use, as over time there are more rather than fewer and it becomes increasingly difficult to find the image you are looking for. I had already placed 3 icon buttons at the top right-hand corner for the various view modes and was faced with the decision of how to implement further control elements such as drop-down lists or similar. But I didn’t want the interface to look like “Your Company’s App” at some point, plastered with controls that distract the eye from the photos. Ideas such as folding and unfolding control panels, i.e. hiding the functionality, were also out of the question at second glance. That would only have shifted the problem.

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To anticipate: I’m a fucking groupie when it comes to seeing Daniel Wirtz in action on stage. My wife (also a long-time fan) and I drove 400 and some crushed kilometres to Leipzig to see his show at the Felsenkeller. FINALLY he is back on tour with his new damn good and loud album DNA.

For those of you who don’t know what the hell I’m talking about: Daniel Wirtz, or simply WIRTZ, is the only German rock artist who really deserves that name. You may forgive me, but I’ve been listening to Rock, Hard Rock, Metal and the like since the early 80s (my first album was KISS - Unmasked), and not one German citizen had enough rock in their blood for me like the Brits or Americans have in abundance. I was always of the opinion that Grunge, Nu Metal and all similar sounds couldn’t come from Germany, let alone … be performed with German lyrics! But I was wrong…

I first became aware of WIRTZ in 2015 on a nice German TV show called “Sing mein Song- Das Tauschkonzert“ (Sing My Song, The Swap Concert), where he rocked out songs by other artists in his inimitable way. He sang the lyrics of other authors and put his own guitar sound underneath. Awesome! But what is most ingenious about WIRTZ are his own lyrics. Straightforward on the one hand and very poetic on the other. Simply awesome shit in this combination!

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In Germany, especially along the Rhine, there is only one thing for many people every February: Fasching, Fastnacht, Fasnet or simply Karneval. Many terms that all mean the same thing: Making party as long as you can. Mainz, on the other (wrong) side of the Rhine from my home town Wiesbaden, is one of the three strongholds of carnival in this respect. Their Rose Monday parade is really impressive, but Wiesbaden also has such a parade, on Sunday, and it is usually a little longer than the one in Mainz, although not as pompous and live on TV.

This Sunday, after a long time, I was once again at the parade in Wilhelmstraße at 12.11 pm and had my camera with me …

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1:1

Tim and I have known each other since we were at school, which is over 40 years now. He has always been a fan of 1. FC Nürnberg and I can still remember him teasing me on Monday mornings at school about my HSV’s poor performance at the weekend and me teasing him when his Nuremberg team had lost again. Now we were both just sympathisers of our clubs rather than real fans, because I’d never been to a stadium in Hamburg and I don’t think Tim had ever been to the Nuremberg arena either.

Now my passion for football with my hometown club SV Wehen Wiesbaden has awakened in the last year and I have a season ticket for this season and the possibility to get 4 more tickets for every game. So it made sense to ask Tim if he would like to watch the home game in Wiesbaden against his 1. FC Nürnberg, which are playing in the second division again since their relegation in the 2019/2020 season. It’s the first time that Tim and I have gone to the stadium together and he convinced his son Tom and two of his mates to go along, even though the three of them didn’t really seem to have anything to do with FCN.

The spectacular game in the first half of the season a few months ago, with a total of 3 red cards, unfortunately ended in a 2:1 loss for the Wiesbaden team. So we had something to settle with the Nurembergers and at least the fans in the stadium were highly motivated.

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3:1

After four consecutive defeats, the last of which came a week ago away against Magdeburg, the first home game of the year in the second half of the 2. Bundesliga against Hertha BSC was on the programme this Saturday.

I was a little tense, as the team was slowly slipping down the table, but confident that we could win against the Berliners as we had done in the first half of the season, even though Hertha had been unbeaten for almost 10 games. Bärbel, the good soul to my left, was also back in the stadium and we encouraged each other in the best football weather (a little cold but sunny). We had to win again to avoid falling into a mental downward spiral. We and 10,454 spectators believed in it … no, less, because a good quarter of the spectators were quite vociferous Berlin fans. The visitors’ curve was packed.

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I’ve been collecting imaginative and technologically tricky Codepens on a Trello list for quite a while, primarily to learn and perhaps implement them in a project at some point. A good source for high-quality pens is the recently published list of the Top 100 Pens of 2023 on codepen.io. I have already noticed some of the works over the course of the year, but some have slipped through my fingers and so I am glad that I have this list, the order of which is calculated from the hearts (likes) given and their level.

Here are my 10 favourite pens from 2023 … and, like last year, an 11th jaw-droppingly good pen to start with.

What Rafa has conjured up with his pen ClimaCode is truly breathtaking and is spread over 3,658 lines of HTML (including SVG objects), 904 lines of CSS and “only” 138 lines of JavaScript. It’s fun to try out all the controls of this climate dashboard and enjoy the soft parallax effects. My favourite button is of course Nessy.

(Also try out his coffee generator “For The Love Of Coffee”, which is indispensable for IT professionals ;))

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First I saw it on Robb Knight’s website and said to myself “yeah look, another one with a list of his tools”. Then I saw it on Garrit’s blog, then on Chris Coyier’s and today on Cory Dransfeld’s and Chris McLeod’s and I thought: funny trend with the App Defaults. Let’s go for it…

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Today I was listening to Mike McCue’s Dot Social podcast where he talks with Eugen Rochko about Mastodon and ActivityPub. At around 12:30 Eugen talked about Twitter and the fact that Tumblr is willing to join the Fediverse network and he asked a question, which he immediately tried to improve again:

I think that is the future, because why should we have all these different accounts … ehh … like … ehh … all these different experiences that are required to connect with different people, when we could have just one account and connect with everyone who uses different services just from one account?

This slip of the tongue and Eugens emphasis on “ONE account” hit me, because it points to something that has bothered me about Fediverse so far, as wonderfully open and forward-looking as it is:

It doesn’t free me from the need to be a duplicate of myself everywhere in the form of an account.

… because I’m not only a Mastodon, Pixelfed or <you name it > user. I’m me at kiko.io in the first place!

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